The fine folks over Digital Spy published yesterday an interview with Nick Ricks, producer of the LEGO Lord of the Rings video game by Traveler's Tales. It's a pretty lengthy read but gives some great insight as to their approach with the gaming mechanics. Like, you know how in the movies, the characters walked around, like, a LOT? I bet you didn't know this, but did you know that the fellowship, whilst walking Middle Earth, solved puzzles and picked up items along their way? They just cut those scenes out due to studio pressure to keep the movie under 3 hours:

Exactly. We wanted to make sure that there's always something around the next corner. So you'll be heading off towards somewhere and you'll get distracted by this. You smash that up and you find something. Then around the corner you'll find something else and you'll say, 'I've found a new thing', and you then all of a sudden realize you've found yourself in the place you needed to get to anyway.

"So you've gone off on a side path, smashed all these different items, found all these different collections, done all these different puzzles and then you realize you've taken the journey you needed to take, but you were doing things along the way. You're daisy-chaining different puzzles and things like that.

"You can have that balanced experience so you're not just running for ages and seeing nothing while you're trying to get to the next story event.